So I'm running Xmonad on my college computer (which runs Kubuntu) and whenever I leave my desk, instead of using x-screensaver which is incredibly buggy and slow, I just change to another workstation, open a terminal and change language to a language which uses symbols instead of letters, and then change back using an aliased command. For example, my .profile has the lines

alias qwer="setxkbmap jp"
alias *******="setxkbmap ie"

where ******* is my password, using japanese characters. Changing languages seems to be much faster than running x-screensaver.

The problem:
rapidly changing languages seems to crash Linux; it just won't accept input (and it's not because the language hasn't changed back, nothing is output to the console). I can't use Ctrl+Alt+F1..F7, I can't "raise the elephants", anything, it just won't work. I'm just wondering, is this a known issue, and if so, is there something I can do about it?